RMV needs more than whistleblowers

The Grant Thornton report released Friday on the Registry of Motor Vehicles miasma of mismanagement did more than recommend solutions, it lifted the veil on just how the taxpayer-funded agency “works.”

And the picture isn’t pretty.

As the Herald’s Joe Dwinell and Lisa Kashinsky reported, Grant Thornton found that when it comes to raising the alarm on agency errors, employees are often in the dark.

“We have become aware of a general lack of understanding among RMV personnel on ways to raise concerns regarding suspected misconduct,” the report states. “Furthermore, employees seemed unaware of anti-retaliatory protections.”

In the private sector, there are clear chains of command in an organization, and supervisors to report to — people whose job it is to oversee how one’s department is run. And, of course, Human Resources, the nexus of complaints, concerns and solutions. But not at the RMV, apparently. This see-something-say-nothing mentality spurred the auditors to call for a “single hotline” that is “well advertised” and easy for employees to remember and “may encourage reporting of concerns.”

The report also points out “additional risks,” including a backlog of 13,097 criminal data entry items that could result in the revocation of certain commercial or Class D driver’s licenses. The backlog could take anywhere from several months to two years to process.

Massachusetts had a long-standing policy of not prioritizing the processing of out-of-state notifications,” the audit states. And that policy spanned “multiple administrations.” Hopefully this didn’t go back as far as Gov. Foster Furcolo, but one never knows.

It was this bungled record-keeping by the RMV that’s linked to the deadly June 21 accident, in which Volodymyr Zhukovskyy, a 23-year-old West Springfield man, is accused of causing a fatal crash that killed seven motorcyclists in Randolph, N.H. Zhukovskyy kept his driver’s license despite a May 11 operating under the influence charge in Connecticut that should have prompted an automatic suspension.

Grant Thornton earmarked some likely contributors to the agency’s failure, including a lack of effective operational control, inadequate risk management and a lack of oversight by the Merit Rating Board, which didn’t meet for roughly four years between 2015 and 2019.

If a private-sector company operated like that, they would be out of business. But the RMV is funded by the state, i.e. the taxpayers, and so operating revenue  is never imperiled by lack of performance or dissatisfied customers — or even when its inefficiency and mismanagement is linked to several deaths.

We’re not calling for the RMV to be privatized, but it’s time it starts operating like a private sector business — with employee and management goals, efficiency initiatives, a customer-driven philosophy, and accountabilty to “corporate,” i.e. Gov. Charlie Baker.

Whistleblowers are great, and it’s a good thing that Grant Thornton called for more — but there needs to be a sound management strategy in place to ameliorate the need for them. A board that hadn’t met for four years? In the private sector, that’s a good  precursor to a pink slip.

It’s time to put the RMV up on blocks for an overhaul.

 

 

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2oWLuPA